Description

WINNER OF THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

An internationally bestselling debut novel: an energetically told, funny and moving book about how strangers become family.

Reproduction tells a crooked love story which takes strange, winding paths shaped by community, family and fleeting interactions that leave an inedible imprint.

Felicia, a nineteen-year-old West Indian student, and Edgar, an impetuous heir of a wealthy German family, meet when their ailing mothers are assigned the same hospital room. An odd-couple relationship blooms between Edgar and Felicia, ripe with miscommunications and reprisals for perceived and real offences that have some unexpected results.

Fast-forward, their son Armistice is a teenager fixated on a variety of get-rich-quick schemes that are as comic as they are indicative of the immigrant son’s fear of falling through the cracks. When Edgar re-enters Felicia’s life at a typically inopportune moment, the book’s exhilarating final act is set in the motion and Reproduction is revealed.

Publisher Review

Captivating . . . There's a fluidity and zest to Williams's insightful writing . . . A finely balanced novel -- Colin Grant * Guardian * Vastly enjoyable . . . Top-notch comic dialogue makes this light-footed navigation of race and gender politics fizz on the page -- Anthony Cummins * Daily Mail * [An] extremely funny Canadian debut about the decades-long fallout from an ill-advised hook-up between a young Caribbean student and an older white businessman, each grieving the loss of a parent. Pure pleasure, line after pitch-perfect line * Daily Mail *